Do Yourself a Favor: Go See Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro

One takeaway from Raoul Peck’s incredible new Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, about the late, great author James Baldwin, is that there’s basically no point in ever trying to say anything more eloquently, incisively, or powerfully than Baldwin already said it.

Peck saw no need for talking heads, experts, or surrogates: Baldwin makes the case for himself. We hear the late author’s real voice in archival clips: his 1965 debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University on the status of the American Dream (watch it, if you never have); his appearances on television programs in the ’60s, where he shouldered the burden of representing the entirety of the African-American experience to a white host. And, thanks to an understated performance by the actor Samuel L. Jackson, we also hear Baldwin’s writing voice, excerpted from a manuscript for a never-finished project called Remember This House, a triple biography of the civil rights leaders Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers, all three assassinated before their 40th birthdays within five years of one another. Baldwin believed that through their lives and deaths he could trace a thread that would reveal the story of America.

“I want these three lives to bang against each other, as in truth they did, and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people they loved so much, who betrayed them, and for whom they gave their lives,” Baldwin wrote in his book proposal to his agent. “Bang against each other” is an appropriate turn of phrase, insofar as it suggests trauma. I Am Not Your Negro is a film about violence: the ever-present violence of white America against black America, and the cottage industry we’ve developed—through movies, in part—to reframe that violence as heroism, as righteous vengeance borne out against a bogeyman of our own invention.

Peck, born in Haiti and best known for his 2000 film, Lumumba, illustrates Baldwin’s points with excerpts from the American cinematic canon. We watch a Western, in which the heroic white cowboy shoots Indians from their horses as Baldwin tells us: “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6 or 7, to find that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians—and you were rooting for Gary Cooper—that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country, which is your birthplace, to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.”

If moving images allowed us to “make a legend out of a massacre,” it’s also moving images that have forced us—some of us, anyway—to see the massacre unfolding in real time. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged from a new technological reality, in which the ease of taking cell phone videos, of live-streaming, of disseminating footage has helped make evident inconvenient truths that white America has long made a national pastime of ignoring. “White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars,” Baldwin said. “They don’t want to believe, still less, to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country.”

Remember This House never got off the ground. Baldwin only jotted 30 pages of notes before he died from stomach cancer in 1987. Peck’s film takes the architecture of the book and fleshes it out with ideas the author expressed elsewhere. In Peck’s hands, it’s less Malcolm X, King, and Evers whose lives tell the story of this country: it’s Baldwin himself who takes us from slave ships all the way to Ferguson.

And it’s startling to realize how precisely Baldwin, who formulated his ideas decades before the turn of the millennium, speaks to conversations we’re only now having about race in 21st-century America. But that feeling of shock, of course, is exactly what we need to question. What’s most shocking is not our (extremely shocking) lack of progress, but that we, after all these years, are still shocked when someone lays bare our national obsession with denying the equal humanity of black Americans. That’s the mirror we avoid at all costs, because to stare into it would be to see ourselves reflected back as monsters.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin observed, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” It was that act of confrontation that so obsessed the author and Peck in seeking a way to represent Baldwin’s ideas on screen. “The idea was, how do I come up with the ultimate Baldwin? The equivalent of the body of work?” the director told me last month, when we met in the offices of his film distributor to discuss I Am Not Your Negro. “How do I make sure that everybody goes back to his writing?”

I was between 16 and 17. It was probably The Fire Next Time. And it was an incredible discovery. It was a lot of the things I felt and could not put a name on. Baldwin was just on point.

It’s pretty incredible how insightful he is.

He’s precise, and at the same time he’s creative. He’s a poet, a humanist, a sharp political mind, an eloquent speaker, and he knows how to convince you. He knows how to take you and make sure you understand the point he’s making. Those are rare qualities in one man.

I’ve heard before that the Baldwin estate has been reticent about authorizing projects. What was the status of the manuscript for Remember This House? How did you come to know about it?

When I wrote to the estate, I didn’t know who was running it. My own lawyer in L.A. told me: ‘Raoul, I’m not even sure they will answer you, because they are known for not answering.’ I said, this is too important. I have to try. As a documentarian, sometimes you go for three or four years after something until you get a yes. But I wrote and three days later I had an answer.

And the answer was yes?

Come to Washington, come meet us. So I went and I met Gloria Karefa-Smart, James Baldwin’s younger sister, who is running the estate. I realized she had seen my film Lumumba. It had meant a lot to her. It was also her own story, as a young woman, when she went to Africa, she had met a lot of those leaders with James Baldwin.

She was a sort of soul mate, because we almost had a common past. And for some reason she saw me as a sort of continuum.

It took me time to understand why they were so severe about who was going to do whatever with James. There’s been a lot of junk out there. People who abused him. People who have said he’s a has-been, a minor author, who have used him, his writing, or his analysis without giving the credit. And the confusion also came by the fact that Baldwin was very open to anybody. He never played the star. He was somebody who wanted to be all the time in the middle of life. When you live that way, you are famous, but you don’t pretend to be elite, or inaccessible, that leaves a wide field for other people to use you.

American Novelist, Playwright and Social Critic James Baldwin in Istanbul circa 1960

No, that’s another incredible thing. I didn’t want to option a particular book, a chapter, an essay. It was really: I want to option all of Baldwin. I don’t know what film I’m going to make.

I see the way he thinks. I saw how he would, in his notes, write something, and I would discover how he would use one piece, and part of it in another piece. He would try stuff in a private letter to his brother, about his feelings, and those feelings would come back in another form.

I had access. It really was a research process. I tried to write a treatment. I hired a playwright to work with me at some point, because I thought it should be a narrative, and then a mixed form between narrative and documentary. I still wasn’t satisfied until the day when Gloria gave me those thirty pages of notes.

They had never been published, right?

No, he had a contract with McGraw-Hill at the time, and he got a huge advance to write a book. The synopsis was: I want to write a book about these three friends whom I lost, who were all assassinated. I watched them grow and live and become friends, and I want to tell the story of America through them. He had notes about it, but he never got to write it.

So did you consider the film in some way continuing the work of that unfinished book?

Yeah, but I’m a filmmaker. I can’t tell a story just by deciding to tell a story, do it in a didactic way. I need to have my own emotion, to feel, wow, there is something I can discover, I can create. That came in the form of that project: it’s like a mystery book. It doesn’t exist. I say, wow, knowing Baldwin, the way he takes notes, the book exists for me. My job is to find it and put it together. All the pieces are there; it’s just a huge puzzle.

Baldwin, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, is the narrator, but you illustrate a lot of what he’s saying with clips from the history of American cinema. Why the focus on movies?

It’s a visual film. It’s a film about the creation of image, the role of images, how images transport ideology, structure, point of views, perspectives. And Baldwin is also one of the few who had succeeded deconstructing [film], linking it to race in a way that is phenomenal.

I’ve had conversations recently with filmmakers in which we’ve discussed the role of film during times that are politically challenging. One director even went so far as to say that at times like these we need our filmmakers to be propagandists, to help us see things clearly.

That word is too charged. I wouldn’t formulate [it like that.] As a filmmaker, you are a manipulator. Except we are doing it for a good cause. We are not selling anything. We are not doing it for profit, I hope. The work we do, we hope that it will enlighten people, so that those people can bring change. We defend victims, we explain tragedies, that’s what we do. And yes, we manipulate in the same way a writer manipulates a story. I have to make sure when you start seeing a film, you are going to see it until the end. I have to of course entertain you a little bit. The real question is: how far do I go?

But propaganda is something else. It assumes that the people receiving it are being—how do you say?

Duped?

Duped, exactly. It’s like educating your friend about an experience you just had. You don’t want to fool your friend, give him the wrong information.

When I started this profession, I wanted to make films that entertain, but that have content. When I went to film school, they made me believe that the two could not mix.

I want to trust the audience. I want to make sure that I entertain, but I want him also to go home and say: Woah. Maybe I could change that? Maybe I should pursue that? Or that helped me go through my life simply because I just saw on the screen what I’m experiencing. I’m not alone. That is a great thing if you can do that.

That’s why I resent sometimes when people say: Raoul, you make films and you are an activist. I say, no, I’m a citizen, I’m normal. You are not normal if your life is making Scary Movie 6,7 and 8. You decided not to see everything else that is happening. You left that to me, the activist, as if it’s my job, as if I’m born to do that, as if I don’t need money.

Speaking of activism: There was a big conversation around the Women’s March on Washington about the tension between white women who suddenly felt they had something to protest, and black women, who felt they’d been protesting for a long time and were not going to take a back seat. The political climate right now is forcing us to ask: Do we put aside our differences to oppose a shared enemy, or do we finally dive into that complicated, fraught, tense history, and hope to come out the other side with some better understanding? Baldwin really spoke to the notion that the only way through it is through it.

There’s no shortcut. Exactly. People don’t realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I’ve known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American. I know French culture more than the average French person. I know German literature. I know my own culture very well. And it’s as if you’re now telling me, well Raoul, you should make an effort. I had to make that effort. Nobody asked me to do it, but for me it was normal, if I wanted to survive. So now, a certain part of the population is in trouble, and they expect that the whole world has to say, oh, poor you? I say, wake up! The whole world has been in danger that whole time. People have been dying in Syria.

What has been asked of minorities throughout their lives: There is no moment where you had peace. You had peace only if you were in your ghetto, in your bubble. But each time you go to the big world to work, to the restaurant, you are in enemy territory. Anything can happen.

I gave this example once: I can’t complain. I’m a very privileged person. I’m at home wherever I am. I’m not scared of people. I can defend myself. But I still have to make sure in hotels, if there is a young woman waiting for the elevator, and we are going to step in, if I see in her eyes there is some hint of a question, I let her go. I don’t go up.

Because you don’t want to make her uncomfortable?

I don’t want to make her uncomfortable. And I’m tired of being in that situation. I avoid it. I avoid having to look at her, or not look at her, in order not to scare her. I just want my peace. I have to protect myself from my anger. Many black people learn that.

There was a black guy in the subway once. He was kind of crazy. He said: I don’t let people rent space in my brain!

Let’s say you meet [someone with] a racist attitude. He’s going to have a fine day. But you feel frustrated, humiliated. That’s what it means to rent room in your brain. So you learn to protect yourself from that, to evacuate it, to not let it get to you. Even when you’re privileged, you still have to deal with it. You learn to be better at it. You learn to understand that that’s a bigger story. It’s not about me. I can’t do the job for you. I can’t educate you. It’s your problem.

Baldwin said all these things three, four, five decades ago, and we’re only having these conversations now. Who are the people right now who are speaking to this moment in a similar way? You end the film with a Kendrick Lamar song, “The Blacker the Berry.” Is he one of them?

Yes, it was important to me to create the circle. And there were not many people I could call upon. Kendrick Lamar was one of the few. I knew his music. I heard him talk. What he was saying makes sense to me. I wanted him in the film the same way that I made sure I included music that Baldwin loved. The film has a soundtrack that goes from blues, to jazz, to spirituals, to musicals. To end the film with Kendrick Lamar was to solidify the link. I wanted to make sure that young people see the connection with their life today.